As you watch The Morning Show, more context, again, helps. The first three episodes made available to critics are remarkably flat for such a lavish venture. The series looks fantasticpolished and sumptuous in its re-creation of glaring TV studios, glassy Tribeca lofts, ballroom galas. Even a West Virginia coal-mine protest gets juiced with vivid landscapes and countless fleece-wearing extras clutching banners. But the initial story, which features the anchor Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) dealing with misconduct allegations about her on-air partner, Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), feels strangely inert. Anistons Alex is a difficult character to absorb: Shes prickly, guarded even with family members, and mired in an existential crisis even before scandal hits. Carells Mitch, groomed to physically resemble Lauer, is enraged, barking at handlers who seem ill at ease in his presence. Reese Witherspoon plays Bradley Jackson, a local reporter on another network whose viral rant at the coal-mine protest turns her into national news, and whose scrappy underdog status is hard to square with Witherspoons preternatural star presence.

But then, on Thursday, Apple released more episodes to critics, and I watched more, and something changed. The pilot is an odd cocktail of stilted Sorkinian monologues and cashmere-swaddled nervous breakdowns, energized occasionally by Billy Crudups scenery-chewing performance as a satanic network honcho, Cory Ellison. There are periodic explicative orations about the state of the nation. (I think America is tired of Twitter fighting. Its ignorant, and its contributing to the dumbing down of our country.) A scene where a drunken Alex tries to process the news cycle outing Mitch as a serial harasser by going into his dressing room and rifling through his kombucha stash feels emotionally idle, and endless.

And yet, when The Morning Show finally gets its setup established, and starts to grapple with the consequences and the meaning of what Mitch has actually done, the show finds some momentum. Its at its most fascinating, and meaningful, when its picking at the cultural scar tissue left by so many allegations: the men in puddles of self-pitying reprisal, the dishonest proclamations that persist even now about movements going too far and all men being tarred with the same sticky brush, regardless of the scale of their reported offenses. With Carells Mitch, The Morning Show gets to think about the self-aggrandizement and denial that make some abusers incapable of honestly evaluating themselves. But it also gives space to the women he harassed to explain how his behavior affected them.

The moments in which Kerry Ehrin, The Morning Shows showrunner, and Mimi Leder, its director and executive producer, etch out Mitchs stages of delusion are riveting to watch. In the pilot, hes irate. They cant just do this to me, he rants, a cornered child smashing his toys. Its illegal. They cant just ruin my career based on hearsay. I didnt rape anybody. By Episode 2, hes in denial, insisting to his business manager that this substantial hit to his income is only temporary. But in Episode 3, when Mitch plays tennis with a scandal-ridden film director (played by Martin Short) whom he initially sees as a fellow victim of an overbearing witch hunt, you can finally sense the sharper edges of self-awareness start to pierce Mitchs armor. It gradually dawns on him that the man hes aligning himself with is actually a predator. But that same realization makes it harder to conceal the fact that he might be one, too.

The rest is here:
A #MeToo Scandal Erupts. The Morning Show Captures What Happens Next. - The Atlantic